Ember announced today it has begun customer shipments of its EM250 ZigBee™ system-on-a-chip (SoC), tools and software. ZigBee is a wireless network standard that solves the unique needs of remote monitoring and control, and sensor network applications.
The EM250 is Ember’s fourth-generation embedded wireless mesh networking platform. The 802.15.4/ZigBee-based semiconductor system integrates a programmable microprocessor, RF radio, network protocol stack and memory into a tiny, single-chip solution smaller than a shirt button (7 mm on a side). It offers companies building ZigBee-enabled products dramatic reductions in component size, cost and power consumption, while having twice the wireless range of competitive ZigBee SoCs. Moreover, the chip’s diminutive size and power needs enable ZigBee capabilities to be embedded into products never before possible.
The EM250 semiconductor system delivers long range and reliable coexistence, and includes a low-power 16-bit microcontroller, 128 kilobytes of flash memory, 5K of RAM, 2.4GHz radio and Ember’s EmberZNet™ 2.1 software. EmberZNet 2.1 is a ZigBee-compliant networking stack that also features a number of unique enhancements that extend ZigBee functionality, simplicity and performance. These include support for mobile nodes, large/dense networks, as well as a transport layer to provide more reliable wireless communication between nodes and enable distributed bindings. The EM250 has the resources required to serve as a ZigBee coordinator node, a full function device (FFD) or a reduced function device (RFD).
Ember’s new single-chip platform enables self-organizing, self-healing wireless networks upon which ZigBee applications can be easily built and deployed. The technology is already designed into numerous products from major companies. France’s Schneider Electric is architecting the chip into electricity and automation management products. And France Telecom is designing a wireless monitoring system with the platform.
“Low-power wireless technologies, like Ember’s EM250 ZigBee system-on-chip, are making possible new services that will open up new markets,” said Gabriel Chegaray, project manager at France Telecom. “The EM250 delivers exceptional performance. Ember is setting the standard for embedded wireless networking, with its industry leading ZigBee platform.”
Low-power single-chip solutions like the EM250 ZigBee are making possible new wireless services that are opening up new markets for OEMs. The EM250 delivers exceptional performance for these customers, which has caused Ember to become the leading provider of ZigBee platforms.
The EM250 is complemented by best-in-class tools for rapid application development and debugging. The Ember InSight™ Development Environment enables OEMs to build embedded wireless applications for their products quickly and reliably. The InSight EM250 Development Kit includes hardware, network development and debugging software, compiler and EmberZNet 2.1 for embedded applications, all delivered in a single, integrated development environment
“Ember’s powerful InSight Development Environment provides a vastly superior and easy application programming interface that shields us from the intricacies of ZigBee networking, enabling us to focus our efforts on designing solid applications,” said Marc Bruel, manager of research and development with Schneider Electric. “And EmberZNet software has for long been universally recognized as the most reliable and features rich ZigBee networking stack.”
Pricing and availability
The InSight EM250 Development Kit costs $10,000 in the full version, and $2,500 in the JumpStart version. Both kits have begun shipping under allocation and availability will ramp up in April.
ZigBee: Wireless Control That Simply Works
The ZigBee Alliance is an association of companies working together to enable reliable, cost-effective, low-power, wirelessly networked, monitoring and control products based on an open global standard. The ZigBee Alliance is a rapidly growing, non-profit industry consortium of leading semiconductor manufacturers, technology providers, OEMs, and end-users worldwide. Membership is open to all. Additional information can be found at www.zigbee.org.
About Ember Corporation
Ember enables communication among embedded microcontrollers with standards-based wireless mesh networking semiconductors and software. Ember helps its customers to automate home appliances, lower energy consumption in buildings, keep borders and infrastructure secure, and control industrial processes, just to name four of the many diverse applications being developed by Ember’s more than 100 customers. Spun out of MIT in 2001, Ember is headquartered in Boston and has its radio development center in Cambridge, England, and distributors worldwide. Ember is a lead member of the ZigBee Alliance, and its platform is the National Technical Systems’ (NTS) “Golden Suite” for 802.15.4/ZigBee interoperability testing. For more information, please visit www.ember.com.
